Imagine plucking a guitar string. It vibrates, the sound lingers, and then fades away as the energy drains into the air. Now bring this scene down to the scale of an atom. Can an atom vibrate in the ...

A Vermont research team has cracked a 90-year-old puzzle, creating a quantum version of the damped harmonic oscillator. By reformulating Lamb’s classical model, they showed how atomic vibrations can ...

Shock absorbers transmit some of the shock directly to the isolated part. Engineers can mitigate the problem by adding dampers or with complex control systems, but the self-damped air spring offers a ...